At the beginning of this year, I made a quilt for myself. It took a total of 74 days to complete. Apart from my actual work, I was quilting. Up to then I had only made quilts for other people as gifts and they were just baby quilts. This was going to be a HUGE project for me. I started out wanting to make a queen size quilt to fit my bed, but it just ended up getting a little bigger than I had originally intended to. Please note that I did not document the making of this quilt as it was not my intention to show the making of it. I made this quilt during a sad point in my life and the Covid Lock-down had just begun so I needed this quilt to help with keeping me busy and sane.

The material quilting cakes were purchased from Missouri Star Quilt Company. (Links will be in the footnotes at the end) I purchased two different material cakes: a 5” charm pack and a 10” layer cake. The solid blue colors were purchased from Joann’s Fabric Store. Once I figured out a pattern that I liked I put them all down on my bed to make sure I liked the placement. Sorry about the blurry picture.

I thought it looked a little too busy so I thought about adding in a solid color to break up all of the prints . I sewed together the middle section with the 5” squares first with the solid color breaking them up. I did a lot of measuring made sure the length of the middle section matched up to the overall length of the 10” blocks. Then I sewed all of the blocks up and voila.

I wanted to add a border piece as it didn’t look complete, so I used a similar solid blue color that I used in the middle section on the sides to frame the quilt. Joann’s was sold out of the color that I used for the mid-section and it was lock-down so there was no telling when it would be restocked.

The face of this quilt was the easy part. The hard part was dealing with the minky fabric which was used for the underside. It is a very slippery fabric and so hard to sew via machine if you don’t have the right needle. And of course I didn’t have the needle I needed, so I had sewed the back of the quilt. I made cut 8 panels of the minky fabric so that each panel measured 40.5” x 24” which accounted for the margin as well. They would be laid in two rows of 4 panels. I hand sewed all of the panels together and afterwards realized that I really needed to invest in a thimble.

Guess what…we are only about halfway done.

From this point I put all of the layers together - the top layer, the filling and the cuddle fabric. First I added a cross stitch with a french knot in the middle of each 2 squares, which joint all three layers together. After this, I added a single line of hand stitching around the main quilting block. Lastly, I added lace to the edge of the blue material border piece by hand and then I added the yellow hem piece.

AAAANNNND FINALLY IT WAS COMPLETE!